Day 1: Highway 101 to the 10
Road Tripping through America with a raging pandemic was no easy feat. Businesses are closed, national parks shut down, monuments abandoned. Yet, regardless of the obvious set-backs, many adventures and incredible experiences awaited us, as my girlfriend and I set off on a ten-day highway journey from California to Michigan. Because of Covid we were relegated to visiting America’s small towns and less visited areas, avoiding the cities and hotspots that were making the news every hour. With a loose itinerary, we decided to spend most of our time in magical Sedona, the high desert of the Four Corners, and finally Santa Fe, New Mexico before venturing into the country’s heartland; a place that felt almost foreign for two ocean loving Californians.
Leaving Santa Barbara on an early weekday morning, we were well rested and ready for the drive to Palm Springs, our stop for the first day of our trip. Santa Barbara is one of the country’s most beautiful towns; Spanish colonial architecture sandwiched between outstretched mountains and the Santa Barbara Channel, a somewhat protected Pacific harborage and one of the world’s ecological hotspots. As we passed the large west swells making their way into the channel, breaking along the endless pointbreaks and the precarious homes that line their shores, we took our last look at the rich blue sea. The corduroy lines of waves stacked to the horizon were our final sendoffs as we jetted towards Los Angeles.
Highway 101 swerves through the San Fernando valley as it absorbs endless streams of traffic. We were on a constant schedule of accident-inducing bumper-to-bumper traffic. Heavy smog worsened as we entered the city. At this point, Covid-19 is rampant and we had no desire to stop. Our beloved lunch spots, noodle shops, taco trucks, BBQ joints are all off limits as we cruised through, munching on Indian Kachori and singing duets to David Bowie hits.
Highway 210 continued this exhausting traffic pattern until we finally entered I-10, the Southernmost interstate in the country. East of Los Angeles, the freeway becomes known as the San Bernardino Freeway and later changes to the Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway. The San Bernardino Mountain range towers to the North as the desert climate begins making its debut in the lowlands. Once home to the California Grizzly, the mountains still contain a dizzying array of wildlife and over 1500 species of plant life, making the peaks look like verdant islands above barren sand and bare rock.
This stretch of Interstate-10 starts to mimic scenes out of One Thousand and One Nights. The verdant mountain tops give way to rolling desert hills, which hide beautiful freshwater oasis filled with groves of California Fan palms and tall grasses. For us, these desert scenes combined with the crackling heat and endless expanse of parched earth, windmills, and abandoned shacks, was our cue to crank up the loud distorted harmonies of our favorite desert rock bands: Kyuss, Fu Manchu, and any of the dozen or so acts featuring Josh Homme. The natural environment, like the music made here, is harsh yet sublime, imposing and comforting all at once.
Past the sprawling city of Palm Springs is the vast plateau known as Joshua Tree National Park, truly one of America’s most breathtakingly beautiful natural spaces. Named after the towering yucca plants that cover this arid landscape, the park is home to incredibly beautiful rock formations that are a rock climber’s dreamland. Giant boulders are endlessly strewn about like a magnified game of marbles. Inhabiting these surreal monuments are the unique desert fauna: rattlesnakes, desert tortoises, coyotes, and the ever common scorpions which become iridescent under a blacklight; finding them is one of the most exciting late-night activities unique to this region.
We safely ended day one under the endless starry sky, visiting two close friends for an amazing patio dinner at their home. With the gnarled LA traffic and smog behind us, we were instantly refreshed by the cool desert wind as we stretched out our legs and settled down with our company and glass of wine. With the mighty Colorado River just a few hours ahead of us, we were excited to cross into vortex-rich Arizona for the second day of our adventure through America.